Brendan Gahan is an American social media marketer, public speaker, and YouTube marketing expert.

Gahan is founder of Epic Signal, and works with Fortune 500 brands on their YouTube influencer and community building campaigns. Gahan is on the advisory board for Vidcon, the largest YouTube gathering, he was named Forbes 30 Under 30 in Marketing & Advertising.
You can find Brendan on Twitter at @BrendanGahan

The World Cup, E-Sports, and The Battle For Eyeballs

The World Cup has begun and major brands such Budweiser, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola have launched ad campaigns to take advantage of the global event.

While the matches are sure to generate billions of viewers the question remains – in this fractured media landscape will the World Cup, and sports as a whole, manage to remain the media and advertising powerhouse it has historically been?

The opening-night match of Russia vs Saudi brought in 9.5 million German viewers – well below the15.9 million that watched the kickoff between Brazil and Croatia in 2014. Similar patterns emerged in France, which had 4 million viewers this year – a decline from 8.7 million in 2014. The British had just over 5 million viewers this year, which was a 7 million-viewer decline from the twelve million fans that watched the opening match in 2014.

The massive awareness and global viewership that the World Cup draws is a unique event and there’s nothing else like it, and, I can understand why brands would tap into these events to advertise. However, I think its clear that the influence of sports as a whole is dwindling – digital influencers, e-sports, and e-sports athletes are chipping away at the market-share of traditional sports.

More than half the MLB’s markets have seen a significant decline in viewers with the Miami Marlins seeing the biggest – a 30% drop. Even the NBA has seen sharp drop in viewership. The 2016-2017 season saw local ratings for 27 of the 30 NBA teams drop and 15 of those experienced double-digit decreases.

Over the years more options have become available to viewers – this could mean that viewers still love their sports and their teams but choose to watch them later or read about them online. However, I think we’re seeing a significant amount of marketshare being wrestled away from sports entirely.

I think that traditional sports are akin to Gillette, before Dollar Shave Club first came on the scene. Previously, they both had a monopoly – then overnight there was a direct to consumer alternative. In this analogy the alternative is e-sports.

More support for this theory is that digital stars have already surpassed traditional athletes in terms of social media popularity.